Google is smart. Very smart. They have without a doubt some of the best engineers in the world. They do the hard work that makes so much of modern technology seem like something out of a science fiction novel. Whatever they tackle, they dominate… for the most part.
Google is smart. Very smart. They have without a doubt some of the best engineers in the world. They do the hard work that makes so much of modern technology seem like something out of a science fiction novel. Whatever they tackle, they dominate… for the most part.
Before Google, search was ruled by the likes of Yahoo!, Lycos, and Alta-Vista; the early years of the public modern internet were a very dark and grim place. Then the once and future search giant came and the world never looked back. The same can be said for email with Google’s GMail service. Sure, it isn’t actually the top dog when you look at market share, but to the tech savvy there is no other comparable option. Google didn’t stop there though, they continued to revolutionize what the internet can do for you: Maps, Navigation, Places, Voice Search, Images, News, RSS, Blogs, Video(YouTube), and so on. Google quickly became the go to place for anything online, that is until Social Networks got on the scene.
Blogs were among the first sites promoting the idea of social. Sure there were BBS and Forums before then, but social as its understood and implemented online today is much different from those models. Blogs, as popular as they were and still are, were not the right direction and so sites like Friendster and MySpace were developed. Places where a user would have a profile viewable by friends and the ability to display and discuss similar interests with people in a very fast paced manner. Facebook would eventually become the biggest of all networks, coming in at about 600+ million users. Not long after Facebook, Twitter was created and took the best parts of social, sharing and communicating with friends, and combined it with the best part of blogs, updates and news. These two companies arguably dominate social on the internet and for the first time Google was not in the limelight.
Like I said at the beginning, Google is really smart. No one will deny that, but Google is socially awkward. Like that nerdy kid in class, he is smart and even kind of cool when you get to know him, but he just can’t help but put his foot in his mouth around a large group. For proof of this we need not look any further than Google’s previous attempts at social.
Orkut, possibly the first of Google’s social networks. It is rarely even talked about and is often never mentioned as it didn’t get any attention in the USA and Google never really took the time to advertise it. They tried to take on Twitter, which is taking over realtime search and news, a category that Google would understandably want to be in, with Google Buzz. Buzz what met with the utmost of hate by all GMail users when the service got forced on them and as it stands today I can think of only one person who uses it. Wave is another service that was set to reinvent email, chat, and document collaboration, but what abandoned before it even got out of beta. Those were novel attempts, but what Google needed to do was take a shot at Facebook if it really wanted to stake a claim on the social pie. And that is exactly what they did with Google+.
Google+ is in many ways a reskin of the basic Facebook experience with a few interesting ideas excellently executed. People often complain about privacy controlls on Facebook, though I find that ridiculous as its stupidly easy to adjust and always has been, so Google created Circles to control your groups of friends and what content gets shared with whom. Social networks are social in so far as they allow you to communicate with one person at a time, so Google made Hangouts to make quick groupings of friends to communicate in a chatroom or video call. And they took the Twitter model in that friendships are not strictly bi-directional. All very good ideas, but the the entire experience is unfortunately hollow. It isn’t even a matter or the product being in beta and not a lot of people using it, it just doesn’t feel good enough. When you compare it to Facebook it feel just like a me too type of deal. Especially now that Facebook has made it easier to create group chats and video calls along with a major revamp of the their messaging platform. When Facebook was made it was something new and innovative; the wall, likes, apps, everything, it was all new and different. There is nothing all that new about Google+.
Google, thankfully, hasn’t let their interest in social interfere with their other core services. I understand the power of being able to tap into a person’s “social graph” to give me relevant personalized results, but it doesn’t have to mean I have to rebuild my entire online identity on a service that seems like it will inevitably fail to do so. Bing, yes I am going to reference Bing as doing something right, understands this and integrates Facebook likes into its search results to show restaurants in line with what your friends like. This is a simplistic feature, but it could be expanded out to include your music, movie, book, and topics tastes.
Google needs to stop trying to go social, they just don’t have the culture for it. There is nothing wrong with that and it’s admirable that they are trying to reinvent themselves. That’s very hard to do, but there is no shame and backing off for right now on this. Google+ isn’t the answer. All their other improvements that came along with this launch are amazing! The new UI and design are a long time coming and most welcome.
That said, I don’t think Facebook and Twitter are the end all be all of social, there is definitely room for others to get a piece of the pie or even replace an existing platform, but whatever that service is, it isn’t anything like Google+, that is to say, it isn’t anything like Facebook or Twitter.